CHAPTER 3
‘So, the pond was stagnant and the hill to climb was nearly vertical’ I thought as I wondered what Mr Sunter predicted for the future of South Africa specifically?
The economic crossroads in South Africa:
‘We are at the most important moment in our history since 1994. With a national unemployment rate of 25% and a figure of more than 51%* among young people, our economy is failing to provide anything like the proper degree of economic freedom to go with our political democracy. We can undo all the good of the last 20 years if we do not act now to rectify the imbalance.
Bearing in mind the fourth piece of breaking news about the changing nature of work, the only way to create 5 million jobs by 2020 and 11 million jobs by 2030* is to open the floodgates of entrepreneurship in this country.
We need at least one million new sustainable businesses to get anywhere close to these job figures.
It is my fervent wish that the one item of breaking news we hear about in this country in 2015 is that the government has become the champion of small business and is intent on providing a platform to make it happen.
I do not mind whether you call it citizen capitalism or creating a new generation of industrialists as long as the principle becomes the centrepiece of implementing the National Development Plan. For if it does not happen, the breaking news at the end of this year will be that we are nearer to being a failed state - in our own eyes and in the eyes of the rest of the world’
The waitron arrived to replenish my glass of Nederburg Cabernet and take my lunch order. I had settled on the shrimp salad starter and the osso buco main dish. As she disappeared into the kitchen I sipped my wine and slid back into my reverie.
I thought ‘Government, with their outdated communist disciplines, had intercepted the pass to the Private Sector and, after twenty years of helping themselves to the slosh in the trough, were close to admitting that they had dropped the ball. Their endeavour to empty the treasury and fill their pockets had however been a resounding success.
South Africa needed one million sustainable new enterprises capable of creating five million job opportunities to survive. We were back to the ‘dig ditches then fill ditches’ tactic of depressed pre-war Germany.
I realize that, in addition to the kleptocratic government regime in power, the risk averse banking sector in South Africa these past forty years also deserved scorn for their risk averse, short sighted and selfish investment policies. Shame on them too.